Financial Intelligence Unit Issues Fraud Alert

Kent Clare

The Financial Intelligence Unit is issuing an alert following a recent spike in online “phishing.” This time, the scammers are contacting people electronically trying to get them to provide private information in order to carry out fraudulent transfers of funds via online banking. News Five spoke with Kent Clare, the Director at F.I.U.

Kent Clare, Director, F.I.U. Belize

“Typically with some banks what they are going to do, they are going to give you some kind of, they have your phone and you are going to get a notification on your phone that a transfer has occurred. So, in this case or in the cases we have been seeing recently, some of that would have happened. Some individual became aware through a text from the bank that certain transactions have occurred with their accounts. That is how immediately they contacted the bank and realized that, but it turns out though that the persons who this happened to, they somehow inadvertently compromised their own accounts because they got a mail or some text or something to say this is your bank reaching out to you, because of the migration, or because of something else, an updating or something like that, we need you to click, there is a kind of click-bait, something to click on, and you are suppose to, once you do that, you were suppose to supply your credentials. Your banks will rarely, if ever, do something like that. The banks won’t do that.”